Risks to Financial Stability and Monetary Policy: Rules or Discretion?

U Rules and Discretion in Monetary Policy

HOULD MONETARY POLICY be determined by a legislated rule or by a monetary authority’s discretion? Henry Simons (1936) first raised this issue as a choice between rules and authorities, terms little different than those used in recent discussions. He stresses the value of a rule, such as a law, instead of reliance on an authority’s discretion because “definite, stable, legislative rules of the g...

Rules, Discretion and Reputation in a Model of Monetary Policy*

In a discretionary regime the monetary authority can print more money and create more inflation than people expect. But, although these inflation surprises can have some benefits, they cannot arise systematically in equilibrium when people understand the policymaker’s incentives and form their expeziations accordingly. Because the policymaker has the power to create inflation shocks ex pest, th...

Rules and Discretion in the Conduct of Monetary Policy

Learning, monetary policy rules, and macroeconomic stability

Several papers have documented a regime switch in US monetary policy from ‘passive’ and destabilizing in the pre-1979 period to ‘active’ and stabilizing afterwards. These studies typically work with DSGE models with rational expectations. This paper relaxes the assumption of rational expectations and allows for learning instead. Economic agents form expectations from simple models and update th...

Worldwide Macroeconomic Stability and Monetary Policy Rules

We study the interaction of multiple large economies in dynamic stochastic general equilibrium. Each economy has a monetary policymaker that attempts to control the economy through the use of a linear nominal interest rate feedback rule. We show how the determinacy of worldwide equilibrium depends on the joint behavior of policymakers worldwide. We also show how indeterminacy exposes all econom...